THE LAST AFTERNOON
ACROSS TOWN
THREE blocks from the Kingsley, June was making instant cocoa while Sydney perched on the edge of the nondescript hotel bed. Outside, it had started to rain. Syd tried Victor’s phone again, but it was off now, just like Mitch’s. She’d even tried Dominic’s number, but there was no answer there, either.
June had told her everything—EON’s task force, their mission to catch Victor and Sydney, the simple fact that June had to choose quickly, knowing she only had time to reach one. She’d been so worried—and by the time she got to the Kingsley, the EON soldiers were already there.
Which meant that Mitch—
June seemed to read Syd’s mind.
“The big guy can take care of himself,” she said, carrying over two mugs, “and if he can’t, what difference would you have made? No offense, Syd, but your power wouldn’t protect him—it would only get you caught, and Mitch wouldn’t have wanted that.” She paused. “Drink up, you’re shivering.”
Sydney wrapped her fingers around the hot mug. June sank into a nearby chair. It was so weird, seeing her again. Syd had had the other girl’s voice in her ear for more than three years, the words on her phone, but she’d only seen June’s face once before, and of course, it wasn’t really hers. It wasn’t even the one she was wearing now.
Sydney took a long, scalding sip, cringing not at the heat but the sugar—June had made it way too sweet.
“What do you really look like?” she asked, blowing on the steam.
June winked. “Sorry, kiddo, a girl’s gotta have some secrets.”
Syd looked down at the cocoa and shook her head. “What am I going to do now?”
“We,” said June, “are going to think of something. We’ll get through this, you and me. We just have to lie low until it’s over, and then—”
“Until what is over?” demanded Syd. “I can’t just stay here when Victor and Mitch are in trouble.”
June leaned forward, resting a hand on Syd’s boot. “They’re not the only ones who can protect you.”
“It’s not about protection,” said Syd, pulling away. “They’re my family.”
June stiffened, but Sydney was already on her feet, abandoning the half-empty mug beside the bed.
June could have grabbed her, but she didn’t. She simply watched her go.
Sydney was almost to the door, reaching for the handle, when it seemed to drift out of reach. The floor had tilted, too. And suddenly, it was all Syd could do to keep from falling over.
She squeezed her eyes shut, but that only made things worse.
When Sydney opened them again, June was there, reaching out to steady her. “It’s okay,” she said, her accent soft, melodic. “It’s okay.”
But it wasn’t.
Syd tried to ask what was going on, but her tongue felt leaden, and when she tried to pull away, she stumbled, head spinning.
“You’ll understand,” June was saying. “When this is all over, you will . . .”
Sydney’s vision blurred, and June’s arms closed around her as she fell.
* * *
THE road jostled under Eli’s feet as the transport made its way toward Merit.
Five minutes into the drive, the hood had come off, trading the dark, woven interior of the fabric for the dark, windowless interior of the van itself. Not a vast improvement, but certainly a step.
The brown-eyed soldier sat on the bench to Eli’s right. The other two sat across from him. They rode in silence, Eli attempting to track the distance with one part of his mind, while the rest traced over the details of the plan he’d been given, pondered the problem of Marcella and her chosen compatriots.
He felt Brown Eyes staring at him.
“Something on your mind?” asked Eli.
“I’m trying to figure out how a guy like you kills thirty-nine people.”
Eli raised a brow. “You can’t kill what’s already dead. You can only dispose of it.”
“Does that apply to you, too?”
Eli considered. For so long, Eli had thought himself the exception, not the rule. Now he knew better. And yet Eli had been given this specific power. A memory flashed through his mind—kneeling on the floor, slicing open his wrists over and over and over to see how many times it would take before God let him die.
“I would bury myself if I could.”
“Must be nice,” said Green Eyes. “To be unkillable.”
A second memory—of lying on that lab table, his heart in Haverty’s hands.
Eli said nothing.
A few minutes later, the van came to a stop on a busy street—Eli could hear the noise even before the back door swung open and Stell himself climbed in. “Briggs,” he said, nodding at the woman. “Samson. Holtz. Any trouble here?”
“No sir,” they said in unison.
“Where have you been?” demanded Eli.
“Believe it or not,” said Stell, “you weren’t the highest priority.”
He’d meant it as a jab, but Eli saw only its truth, written in the lines of the director’s face.
Victor.
The van drove on for a few more blocks before pulling into an alley, where the three soldiers climbed out—but not Stell. He turned his attention to Eli. “They are going ahead to secure the room. In a minute, you and I are going to leave this van and go inside. You make a scene, and that collar will be only the first of your problems.”
Eli held out his cuffed wrists. “If you want to keep a low profile, these should probably come off.”
Stell leaned forward, but simply tossed a coat over Eli’s outstretched hands, hiding them from view. Eli sighed, and followed the director out of the van. He looked up at the stretch of blue sky, and breathed in fresh air for the first time in five years.
Stell brought a hand to Eli’s shoulder, kept it there as they wove through the cars in front of the hotel.
“Remember your instructions,” warned Stell as they stepped through the doors and crossed the lobby to the bank of elevators.
The soldiers were waiting on the fifth floor.
Two in the hall, one still clearing the room.
They’d taken off their helmets in an effort to blend in, revealing three young, good-looking soldiers. A woman in her early thirties, compact and strong and stoic. A young man, handsome and blond, thirty at most, who looked like he would have won Most Likable while in school. A second man, wide-jawed and smug, who reminded Eli of the frat boys he’d hated in college, the kind who would crush a beer can on their heads as if the feat were something to be proud of.
Once inside, Stell finally removed Eli’s handcuffs.
He rubbed his wrists—they weren’t stiff, or sore, but it was a hard habit to shake, that urge, and the small gestures that made people ordinary. Human. Eli surveyed the room. It was an elegant hotel suite, with a large bed and two tall windows. A garment bag hung on the back of the bathroom door, another had been cast onto the bed. A chair sat beneath one of the large windows, a low desk beneath the other, its surface adorned with a pad of paper and a pen.
Eli started toward it.
“Stay away from the windows, inmate.”
Eli ignored him, resting his hand on the desk. “We’re here because of this window.” His fingers closed around the pen. “This view.”
He leaned across the desk and looked out at the Old Courthouse across the street.
What a perfect choice, thought Eli. After all, a courthouse was a place of judgment. Justice.
He straightened, slipping the pen up his sleeve, and started for the bathroom.
“Where do you think you’re going?” demanded Green Eyes.
“To take a shower,” said Eli. “I need to be presentable.”
The soldiers looked to Stell, who stared at Eli for a long moment before nodding. “Sweep it,” he ordered.
Eli waited while the soldiers secured the bathroom, making sure there was no way out, removing anything that might be even vaguely construed as a weapon. As if Eli himself weren’t the weapon of choice today.
When the soldiers were satisfied, he unhooked the garment bag from the bathroom door and stepped inside. He was pulling it shut when one of the soldiers caught the door. “Leave it open.”
“Suit yourself,” said Eli.
He left a foot of clearance, for modesty. Hung up the borrowed suit, and turned on the shower.
With his back to the open door, Eli freed the stolen pen from the cuff of his EON-issued jacket and held it between his teeth as he stripped off the clothes, let them pool around his feet.
He stepped into the shower, the frosted glass door falling shut behind him. He ran his fingers over the surface of the steel collar, searching for a weakness, a groove or clasp. But he found none. Eli hissed in annoyance.
The collar, then, would have to wait.
He removed the stolen pen from his mouth, and under the static of the water’s spray, snapped it in two.
It was hardly ideal, but it was the closest thing to a knife he was likely to get.
Eli closed his eyes, and summoned the pages from the black folder. He’d studied them thoroughly, memorized the photos and scans that had accompanied each of Haverty’s experiments.
The record had been gruesome but revealing.
The first time Eli had noticed the shadow on an image of his forearm, he’d taken it for a swatch, just one of those markers used to signal direction on an X-ray. But then it showed up again on an MRI. A small metal rectangle, the faint impression of a grid.
And he knew exactly what it was.
Eli found the same mark on a scan of his lower spine. At his left hip. The base of his skull. Between his ribs. Disgust had welled like blood as Eli realized—every time Haverty had cut or pried or pinned him open, the doctor had left a tracking device behind. Each one small enough so that Eli’s body, instead of rejecting the objects, simply healed around them.
Eli brought his makeshift scalpel to his forearm and pressed down. The skin split, blood rising instantly along the jagged edge, and an old voice in his head noted that the heat and moisture would act as anticoagulants, before he reminded that voice that his healing power rendered the fact irrelevant.
He clenched his teeth as he drove the plastic deeper.
Haverty had never bothered with shallow wounds. When he opened Eli up, he did it down to bone. The static of the spray would have provided a buffer, but Eli didn’t make a sound.
Still, as his fingers slipped and slid, and blood ran down the drain, Eli felt a tremor of residual panic pass through him. The only kind of mark left by Haverty’s work. Invisible, but insidious.
At last, the tracker came free, a sliver of dark metal clutched between stained fingers. Eli set it in the soap dish with a shaky breath.
One down.
Four to go.
THE KINGSLEY
MITCH rolled over, and spit a mouthful of blood onto the hardwood floor.
One eye was swelling shut, and he couldn’t breathe through his broken nose, but he was alive. He could move. He could think.
For now, that would have to be enough.
The apartment was empty. The soldiers were gone.
They’d left Mitch behind.
Human.
That one word—a judgment, a sentence—had saved his life. The EON soldiers lacked either the time or the energy to deal with someone so tangential to their pursuit.
Mitch forced himself to his hands and knees with a groan. He had a muddled memory of movement, grasping at consciousness as the soldiers spoke.
We’ve got him.
It took a long time for the words to sink into Mitch’s bruised skull.
Victor.
He got, haltingly, to his feet and looked around, taking in the trashed apartment, the bloodstained floor, the dog lying on the floor nearby.
“Sorry, boy,” he murmured, wishing he could do more for Dol. But only Sydney could have helped him now, and Mitch had no idea where she was. He stood there, amid the carnage, torn between the need to wait for her and the need to go find Victor, and for a second the two forces seemed to pull him physically, painfully apart.
But Mitch couldn’t do both, and he knew it, so he asked himself, what would Victor do? What would Syd? And when the answers were the same, he knew.
Mitch had to leave.
The question was where to go.
The soldiers had taken his laptop, and he had crushed his primary cell, but Mitch crouched—which turned out to hurt just as much as standing up—and felt under the lip of the sofa, dislodging the small black box and the burner smartphone that it was feeding into.
His butler.
In the old black-and-white movies he’d always loved, a good butler was neither seen nor heard, not until they were needed. And yet they were always there, tucked innocently into the background, and always seemed to know the comings and goings of the house.
The concept behind Mitch’s device was the same.
He booted the phone and watched as the data from the soldiers’ electronic tracking streamed in. Calls. Texts. Locations.
Three phones. And they were all in one place.
Got you.
All his life, people had underestimated Mitch. They took one look at his size, his bulk, his tattooed arms and shaved head, and made a snap judgment: slow, stupid, useless.
EON had underestimated him too.
Mitch looked around, found the playing card Sydney had left behind. He scribbled a quick instruction on the back, and rested the playing card on the dog’s motionless side.
“Sorry, boy,” he said again.
And then Mitch grabbed his coat, and his keys, and went to save Victor.